Larry Ellison (left) and his son David Ellison. Photo: Aol.
By Matt Wolfson – Apr 17, 2026
Of the many head-spinning shifts that Donald Trump’s Administration has orchestrated since he took office in January 2025, arguably the least noticed and most significant is the assumption of unrivalled power in Western media of the Ellisons: the Jewish Zionist family which is the biggest single private donor to the IOF. Larry Ellison, who is 81, has been a significant player in technology and politics since the 1970s, when, with early career support from the CIA, he founded Oracle. Oracle has since become a leader in AI, Ellison has since become known for befriending Donald Trump, and, since Trump’s second election to the presidency, Ellison’s rise has been the stuff of which monopolist dreams are made, on a scale that takes the breath away.
In these fifteen months, Ellison used his company, Skydance Media, to purchase Paramount, which includesCBS News, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, MTV, and Comedy Central. He is following this up with the purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, the legacy American production company which includes CNN, the station which pioneered the 24-hour news cycle during the First Gulf War. In tandem with both of these moves, Ellison has also assumed a major stake in TikTok, either the third or the fifth most popular social media platform worldwide.
This shift amounts to something more dangerous than it seems on paper. America had, as of January 20, 2025, five television news outlets which, whatever their domestic political biases, were understood to report news about foreign policy relatively objectively: CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and PBS. It had two newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, which were understood to do the same. What “objective” in this context means is not accuracy; it means each channel or newspaper gave at least some simulation of presenting both sides of foreign conflicts in areas like the Middle East. These outlets would never have been so objective, for example, as to refer to the deaths of Fatima Ftouni, Ali Shoaib and Mohamad Ftouni as what they clearly were, a murder and an imperialist crime; but they might at least conceivably, like The Guardian did in England, have run pieces or reports questioning whether “Israel” violated international law by attacking members of the press.
One or two of the more independent creative entertainment franchises, for example, Warner Bros., take similarly open-minded lines in at least some of the content they produce regarding minority cultures or other countries. Today, 15 months into Donald Trump’s presidency, this list of 8 relatively honest brokers has dwindled by 4—as Warner Bros., CNN, and CBS have been or are being purchased by the Ellisons; and The Washington Post’s foreign correspondents’ desk has been defenestrated by its owner Jeff Bezos not long after an agent of the Ellisons expressed interest in buying it.
The result of these buys is a diminishing number of perspectives available to America’s citizens. This means insulating Americans from information at exactly the time, as the White House encircles Cuba and coerces Venezuela and bombs Iran and empowers ICE, that Americans could most use it. Examining how this situation has come to be in such a short time shows something equally concerning. Namely, that Ellison’s sudden dominance is not by accident or contingency. It is a function of American power networks and the influence exercised inside of them, not just by Ellison but by a bevy of deputies who serve as his agents and have accrued fiefdoms of their own.
These operators are his son David, the owner of Paramount Skydance who is trying to purchase Warner Bros.; Bari Weiss, the former New York Times journalist who is now Editor-in-Chief of CBS and of The Free Press, arguably the most influential magazine of the New York-Washington elite; and Gerry Cardinale, arguably the most influential dealmaker on Wall Street whose investment firm, RedBird Capital Partners, holds 22.5 percent of Paramount Skydance’s voting rights. Investigating these operators’ success shows much about how power works inside America at Zionist hands: based on insider connections unknown to the public, which are used to acquire power, then translate power into propaganda.
The Ellison takeover of media during Trump’s 15 months in office began somewhat before the 2024 election, in late 2023, with meetings between David Ellison and Shari Redstone, then the owner of Paramount. Shari Redstone had inherited the company from her father, Sumner Redstone, who had brought its legacy property CBS into the Paramount network. Redstone had succeeded, at one brief remove, Laurence Tisch as owner of CBS; and Tisch had de facto succeeded William Paley: making the Redstones the third in a line of Jewish Zionist owners. These past owners had to some extent been held in check, however unwillingly, by “creative” talent they were employing. But by the end of 2023, an uneasy détente between ownership and talent was also no longer enough from the point of view of ownership—not in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, and the ensuing media scrutiny of “Israel’s” response.
As early as 2024, Redstone had “publicly broke[n] with the CBS News management team over its handling of an interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates,” who had written a book critical of “Israel”, by the anchor Tony Dokoupil: a Jewish Zionist who had told Coates on air that Coates’s book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” and was then censured by CBS management for bias. Even more decisive to Redstone than the censuring of Dokoupil was October 7 itself, which “had a profound impact on Ms. Redstone, an ardent supporter of Israel whose ex-husband, Yitzhak Korff, known as Ira, is a rabbi and direct descendant of the founder of the Hasidic movement” and whose “son Tyler is also a rabbi.” According to Redstone, speaking to The New York Times, “Once that happened, I wanted out. I wanted to support Israel.”
There never seemed, in this context, much question that a Jewish Zionist family would end up entrusted with Paramount and so of CBS. As Redstone was talking to Ellison, she was also talking to Edgar Bronfman, whose family had co-founded Taglit Birthright; Leon Black, formerly of Apollo Global Management and a patron of Jeffrey Epstein; and Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC. Bronfman, Black, and Diller all had something David Ellison didn’t: a multi-decade track record of success running large and complex corporations. Indeed, Ellison—known initially for “a collection of outrageous sports cars” and “vanity projects, including a now-defunct clothing brand he started with a friend in 2014 called the Lanai Collection, after his father’s Hawaiian island”; and more recently for bringing a hardworking but “nicer” approach than his father to his father’s business—was not an obvious operator for a corporate turnaround.
But Ellison had four things the other suitors did not. The first was his father, Larry, whose net worth is between $200 to $400 billion depending on the month, and Larry Ellison’s connections to the ascendant Trump campaign. The second was what Shari Redstone characterized as Ellison’s “vision for the future and a willingness to invest the huge sums at his disposal…to make strategic acquisitions (perhaps even a stake in TikTok, the wildly popular video-sharing platform, the Redstones speculated) and unify Paramount’s disparate technology platforms.” The third was the Ellisons’ devotion to “Israel”, which even by comparison to the competition was profound. (According to New York Magazine, “Larry’s first wife…remembered him taking a week off work to watch coverage of the Six-Day War in 1967” and he “is close with Benjamin Netanyahu, who reportedly vacationed on Larry’s Hawaiian island in 2021.”) The fourth was the presence in the murky and ever-shifting waters of David Ellison’s negotiations with Redstone of a consigliere: the founder and managing partner of RedBird Capital Partners, Gerry Cardinale.
Pictured unnamed in news articles next to David Ellison but lauded in finance pages, Gerry Cardinale is also deeply tied to Jewish Zionist networks. A graduate of Harvard, where he was mentored by Martin Peretz, the then-owner of The New Republic, at the time America’s most prominent Zionist magazine, Cardinale found a foothold on Wall Street. There, his apparent mentor was John Lawson Thornton: the-then co-Chief Operating Officer of Goldman Sachs, a graduate of Hotchkiss and Harvard and Oxford and Yale, the son of the former vice chair of Consolidated Edison, and now Chairman of Redbird Capital Partners, who keeps Cardinale, in true mentor fashion, “in check…at the firm.” Along with Cardinale’s gift for finding Zionist and WASP mentors in worlds they dominated, a handy skill for an Italian Catholic from Villanova, Pennsylvania, Cardinale was also gifted at making money. He did this in part through his skill with numbers, and in part by turning what seems to be his cafeteria Catholic background into a brief for ecumenicism, which is to say for working with everyone.
He worked with the New York Yankees’ George Steinbrenner, Rupert Murdoch, and the Hollywood “super-agent” Ari Emanuel, one of whose brothers had also worked at Martin Peretz’s New Republic. He partnered with Elliott Investment Management, owned by Paul Singer, to acquire AC Milan, the Italian soccer team. He staged a takeover of Britain’s Daily Telegraph and The Spectator in conjunction with United Arab Emirates Vice President Sheikh Mansour, followed by the selling of these properties in the face of widespread resistance from journalists and readers. He and Jeff Zucker, the former CEO of CNN, floated to Jeff Bezos the idea of buying The Washington Post; and it was soon after this call that Bezos laid off The Post’s foreign correspondents and much of The Post’s staff. Cardinale now has a stake in the culture digital weekly Air Mail, founded by a famously prickly former editor at Conde Nast, and thanks to this stake, he has a stake in the insider media business website Puck. He has also made personal inroads with Robert Iger, Michael Eisner’s successor at Disney to whom he supplied an office at RedBird between Iger’s stints as CEO.
In interviews, Cardinale preemptively refutes the notion that “I’m a starf***er, and I just go after these famous people” and he seems, on the evidence, right in his refutation. In fact the more accurate word for him may be “strategic attacher,” especially to Jewish Zionists (Martin Peretz, Ari Emanuel, Paul Singer, Jeff Zucker, Robert Iger) and other players (John Thornton, Rupert Murdoch, Sheikh Mansour, Jeff Bezos, the late George Steinbrenner) with deep ties to Jewish Zionists and “Israel”. All of this has made Cardinale perhaps the ideal operator for a deal where both the Ellisons and the people on the other end, Shari Redstone and Warner Bros.’ CEO David Zaslav, were Jewish Zionists.
Based on his work with these players, Cardinale is called inside Paramount Skydance and not entirely accurately “‘The Godfather” and on Wall Street, “arguably [its] most prolific dealmaker.” His brief appears to be, both before the mergers and after, convincing investors and regulators and (not least importantly) journalists that profits are possible in an industry battered by the “streaming” model of viewership at an entity, Paramount Skydance, which would acquire significant debt to purchase a company, Warner Bros., which has a history of hurting its purchasers. Throughout 2024 and 2025, as Ellison and Redstone and then Ellison as Zaslav negotiated, Cardinale was on hand to provide his own brand of reassuring expertise toThe New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Puck, or, eventually, Paramount Skydance’s shareholder report. In the process, he provided these publications with a thru-line, or theme, about the merger: it was to be seen as a savvy business investment rather than what it was, a bare-knuckled effort to consolidate so much control over media that the normal logic of free markets (the superior product enjoys more profits) doesn’t necessarily apply.
In Autumn of 2025, as Ellison geared up to purchase Warner Bros., to widespread concern in Wall Street and Hollywood, Cardinale was “traveling to the Middle East convincing sovereign-wealth funds to join him in backing Paramount’s bid” for Warner Bros., while “tell[ing] anyone who will listen why the hostile $77.9 billion bid” by Paramount Skydance was “superior” to Netflix’s competing bid. These efforts paid off: on April 7, 2026, The New York Times reported that:
“Paramount Skydance has secured money from three sovereign wealth investors to fund its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery…the total amount was around $24 billion. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, will contribute about $12 billion, and sovereign wealth funds for Abu Dhabi and Qatar will each contribute about $6 billion…”
Inside Paramount Skydance, Cardinale’s brief is what Cardinale describes as “technological disintermediation.” In other words, “we should be able to make movies for half the cost, we should be able to make original content for half the cost” using, for example, “recommendation algorithms, which help people decide what to watch,” and allowing A.I. to “make the whole production of content more efficient.” This suggests the latest iteration of a five-decade effort of mostly Zionist corporate “reformers” with backing from Washington, D.C., to take cost-intensive intellectual property—news, ideas, or artistic work whose creation involves paying people money to think and then create along professional standards—and make it more profitable. This also often means turning intensively constructed content to inform citizens into low-cost entertainment for them to consume. Laurence Tisch tried this at CBS in the 1980s and the 1990s, and the “old guard” fought him there. Gerry Cardinale’s friend Robert Iger tried it in the 2000s across Disney properties and ended up producing fewer pictures. Cardinale’s potential Washington Post seller Jeff Bezos did this at The Washington Post after speaking to Cardinale and Jeff Zucker, with the result that most of The Post’s storied foreign news desks are de facto shuttered. One Warner Bros. collaborator, speaking of the impending sale of Warner Bros. to The New Yorker, predicted that the executives at Paramount Skydance “[are] going to cut at least six thousand jobs. And that’s just getting started.”
But there is another aspect of the Ellison agenda outside profit, an ideological one, to which the profit motive is joined. Here, Ellison’s other major operator outside of Cardinale becomes significant: Bari Weiss, whom David Ellison appointed to steward Paramount’s flagship news property, CBS, while also purchasing her online magazine, The Free Press. If the ecumenical Cardinale breezily describes himself as a “globalist,” Weiss describes herself as a Zionist, which makes her well-suited for her ideological task. Born into an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Pittsburgh, she “spent a couple of summers in Jerusalem, where her parents learned Hebrew” and her father was an early beneficiary of Leslie Wexner’s Zionist charities. After spending some of her time at Columbia University as a “gifted ideological operative” advocating against Joseph Massad, a professor critical of “Israel”, Weiss moved to Tablet Magazine, edited by the Jewish Zionist husband-and-wife-team of Alana Newhouse and David Samuels, the latter of whom had made his name in the late 1980s and 1990s writing for Martin Peretz’s New Republic. From there, she moved to The Wall Street Journal, where her mentor was former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Bret Stephens.
After a stint at The New York Times, where she was hired by James Bennet, another New Republic Jewish Zionist alumnus, and where she departed after he was let go, Weiss decamped to California. There she founded The Free Press with support from the Jewish Zionist technologists and businessmen and financiers David Sacks, Howard Schultz, and Lloyd Blankfein, and mixed in circles including Shari Redstone and David Ellison. What Weiss is now bringing to CBS on David Ellison’s behalf is her Zionist loyalties run through the vehicles of a stated commitment to open debate and the dictum for her newsroom to “think like a start-up.” According to The New York Times,recounting her first full address to the CBS staff,
“We are not producing a product enough people want,” she said, while dismissing day-to-day Nielsen ratings as an outmoded benchmark…She urged her journalists to reel in investigative scoops (and “scoops of ideas, scoops of explanation”) and think beyond traditional TV broadcasts, referring to her ideal reporters as “dynamic Swiss Army knives capable of writing, speaking, hosting, reporting, analyzing and writing.” She also announced a new roster of CBS News contributors with viewpoints spanning the political spectrum…
There is a lot to unpack here, but each individual item matches the suitcase. Describing “ideal reporters” as “swiss army knives” isn’t articulating a traditional professional ideal. It’s branding reporters as multitaskers: people focused not only on “getting the story” but on how the story will “play” and on what podcast guest they can bag to “amplify it” and on what “pivot” they can use to bring it up on a five-minute segment on CNN. What’s most lacking in this model is time for reporting, processing, and then shaping information. This means that, under the influence of editors, reporters who are “swiss army knives” will report stories organized along lines that might look propagandistic to reporters who are more singularly focused. The result is coverage framed by “experts” and reporters who all believe in some version of Zionism and the military corporate networks which sustain it. In this framework of Weiss’s, argument does exist, as a purported correction to what Cardinale calls “our civic discourse [breaking] down.” But this new-and-improved “discourse” exists among Weiss’s favored operators (Niall Ferguson, H.R. McMaster, Roya Hakakian, Jed Rubenfeld, Will Rahn) who agree on the beneficence of American Empire and its main client and patron, “Israel”. Americans, in other words, are getting the illusion of free exchange of ideas without the reality. This is a higher stage of propaganda, and a more insidious one, because it encourages the audience to believe it’s being informed.
In this context, it is not a coincidence that Weiss’s biggest personnel move so far has been hiring Tony Doukopil as CBS’s new evening news anchor, whom Shari Redstone publicly defended two years before. It is not a coincidence, as I have reported at length for The Libertarian Institute, that, since the Trump Administration executed its first bombing run on Iran in June 2025, Weiss has begun running a series of Iranian, Venezuelan, and Cuban American operators who are advocating, in one way or other, for regime change. It is not a coincidence that Weiss has also begun a protracted courtship of “Israel” skeptic Vice President J.D. Vance. And it is not a coincidence that Weiss has practiced sensitivity bordering on deference towards the White House, for example, by delaying a story ready for air on CBS about the Administration deporting unauthorized Venezuelan immigrants to a detention center in El Salvador, where they were allegedly abused.
In her approach to the White House, Weiss is following the model of her employers, David and Larry Ellison, who, as Cardinale and Weiss have placated markets and handled creatives, have kept their focus where the money really is: with Donald Trump. In the summer of 2025, having bought Paramount, “Ellison…opted against reinstating late-show host and Trump critic Stephen Colbert after executives under the prior regime canceled the host’s late-night show.” In late 2025, “Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN, a common target of President Trump’s ire.” At the end of 2025, via the ministrations of Jared Kushner and J.D. Vance, the Ellisons became part of a consortium to buy TikTok from China: a priority of Trump’s that also assuaged Zionist concerns of Pro-Palestinian content on the app. And, that December, news broke from Puck that, “following Mr. Trump’s apparent personal urging of the Ellisons, Paramount agreed to distribute ‘Rush Hour 4’ when other studios wouldn’t touch it, after its filmmaker, Brett Ratner, was accused of sexual misconduct”: the same Brett Ratner, a Jewish Zionist, who “has been directing a documentary about Melania Trump for Amazon.”
During this period, President Trump has publicly praised the Ellisons and attended a UFC fight with David, where David “was photographed in a close circle around Trump…apparently a guest of…Ari Emanuel, who, like Ellison, is Jewish and skipped the Passover celebration to be there.” Analysts argued that “given that Ellison’s [deal for Paramount] requires federal approval…the encounter alone has a deeper significance as the merger hangs in limbo.” Trump also invited David to his State of the Union on February 24, which David attended as negotiations between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. reached their fever pitch. In this context, it did not seem a coincidence that, 12 days before the State of the Union Address, Gail Slater, who was serving as the Justice Department’s chief of the antitrust division and was known for looking carefully at mergers before deciding whether to approve them, was unceremoniously booted from her post. There is very little doubt that, in a post-Slater Justice Department, the Paramount Skydance-Warner merger will be easily approved.
The scale of all of this is unprecedented, but its origins reach back 40 years, to the 1980s, when Donald Trump had his formative professional experiences in New York; and when Larry Ellison and Martin Peretz and John Thornton and David Samuels, the mentors of David Ellison and Gerry Cardinale and Bari Weiss, did the same. Reporting in that period on the WASP and increasingly Jewish Zionist networks peopled by operatives like Barry Diller remaking Los Angeles and New York, the late Joan Didion described these new executives as “prima donnas” interested in power and publicity and opposed to negotiations. According to Didion, their chosen candidate for Los Angeles mayor held dinners for well-heeled supporters at his house in a tony section of the city during which:
“the candidate ordered in pizza, placed it in its box on the dining-room table, and escorted the guest down to an astonishingly extensive wine cellar, there to select a legendary Bordeaux…[in a] show of symbolic confidence, that characterized the entire…campaign…the absolute conviction that he could transmit his own good fortune, which had been to ride the boom years into an estimated hundred million dollars, to the community at large.”
There is much of this same attitude of “magical thinking” in the Ellison network: willful sloppiness followed by brusque assertions that their way is the only way and anyone opposed is either a prima donna himself or rejecting the world’s natural order. Bari Weiss is the subject of allegations of multiple inaccuracies in articles in The Free Press, including allegedly misrepresenting the experiences of at least one couple cited in an article, which upset this couple so much that they went on their local news station to attest that what was in the article was “not just not true, it’s a lie.”
When David Ellison met with Taylor Sheridan, Paramount’s biggest creative moneymaker as well as a famously independent creator, Ellison “wanted to keep Sheridan in the fold but felt the previous regime was too deferential”—and so this “nicer” of the two Ellisons fired Sheridan’s closest Paramount collaborator, rejected Sheridan’s film script, and pushed Sheridan to produce Trump-pitched propaganda, all of which led Sheridan to leave. At Oxford and on his island of Lanai, Larry Ellison makes a habit of summarily firing professionals, whether scientists or artisans, on a seeming whim, and of evicting inhabitants whom he initially promised housing. For all of these players, this is a bare-knuckled business, but also, because the bottom line is money, it is a game where these players can win no matter the outcome. In a recent Financial Times interview, for example, Cardinale “grin[ned]” when he admitted that the failed “gamble” of buying The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator “still paid off” because “RedBird sold control of the paper to Axel Springer for £575mn, a premium to the roughly £500mn it had paid.”
In fact, Cardinale may have described the overall outlook of the Ellison operators most clearly, in this recent interview with The Financial Times, which consisted, in echoes of the Los Angeles dinners described by Didion, of bottles of “Camilucci Franciacorta, Dirupi Nebbiolo,” and “Grappa di Brunello.” Toward the end of this interview, as the grappa arrived, Cardinale said that “what he hates” is the “endless antagonism…he has confronted time and time again” because “there is enormous resistance to evolving…[b]ut evolution is unavoidable.” What he wants instead of resistance, for example, the resistance of British newspaper readers and Italian soccer fans suspicious of foreigners controlling major properties which serve the national interest, “is to get to a point where…I could go to Rome and sit down with [Prime Minister] Meloni or whoever and say: look, let’s have a plan for how we re-underwrite Serie A. Let’s make Serie A one of Italy’s greatest exports.” Not unpredictably, Cardinale the globalist is a fan of the “disrupting” moves of the nominal nationalist Donald Trump. He attested after a meeting with Trump that “we finally have a leader who wants change, and he realizes that the only way you’re going to get change in these very complicated ecosystems is if you embrace a public-private partnership.”
It’s almost beside the point to point out that what Cardinale is saying is fallacious: that, just as social “evolution” is unavoidable but not in a specific direction, so “public-private” partnerships based on insider connections mean government favoring industries in ways that distort the market. But Cardinale’s weapon, like Larry and David Ellison’s and Bari Weiss’s, isn’t accuracy or logic: it’s rhetoric, sophistry, framings to convince listeners that the only way to the future is his way; that the only option is to “play ball”; and that he can “transmit his own good fortune” to “the community at large.” Though these tactics are in the service of Zionism, a religious supremacist project, they owe their success to secular networks of government-connected capital, which concentrate power and then satiate citizens with entertainment. And, for all that operators like Weiss profess to stand for “liberalism” against various “fanaticisms” (Islamism, Marxism, Populism, and Christian Fundamentalism), their own fanaticism for modernization without quarter is easily the most influential fanaticism of all.
But it is the very influence of these networks’ fanatical modernizations that might undo them. Indeed, what they are increasingly going up against, as they try to expand their power, are homogenous and conscious groups of people who believe in something very different from empire. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the global Muslim community, whom Bari Weiss and the Ellisons and the Trump Administration consider enemies, do not see concentrated secular capital markets as desirable; and neither do the Italians and British protesting Gerry Cardinale’s attempted takeover of the newspapers and sports teams that bind them into sovereign nations.
Ellison’s dealmaking performance artists in glass towers may proceed on the logic that, as Cardinale put it to his top goal scorer on AC Milan at the end of the Financial Times interview, “I only want victory,” but the terms of their victory are increasingly intolerable for large numbers of people to accept. And, for these people, nothing about this conflict is a game.
